This story is part of a year-long series about family violence. To offer story suggestions or to critique the series, call 303-820-1592 or 303-820-1829, or e-mail kgo@denverpost.com or evdreyer@aol.com.

WHERE TO TURN

Here are some groups to call for help:

National Center for Missing and Exploited Children: 1-800-422-4453

National Child Abuse Hotline: 1-800-422-4453

National Coalition Against Domestic Violence: 303-839-1852

National Coalition Against Sexual Assault: 717-232-7460

National Domestic Violence Hotline: 1-800-799-7233

National Victim Center: 1-800-394-3255

Rape, Abuse and Incest National Network: 1-800-656-4673

PAST CASES

Colorado teenagers suspected or convicted in the deaths of parents or grandparents:

John Engel, 14, is due in court in April to face charges in the deaths of his mother and grandmother in the family's Longmont home on Dec. 11.

Staci Lynn Davis, 13, pleaded guilty in October to shooting her mother to death at the Arapahoe Park Racetrack in July. She was sentenced to seven years in the state youth corrections system.

Jason Spivey, 17, faces life in prison if convicted in the sexual assault and death of his grandmother in her Denver home in February 1999. He allegedly confessed to strangling his grandmother and stabbing her dog. He is awaiting trial.

Nathan Ybanez, then 17, is serving a life sentence without parole for beating his mother to death with a fireplace tool and strangling her in her Douglas County apartment in June 1998.

Leon Gladwell, then 17, is serving a 40-year prison sentence for beating his grandmother to death with a tire iron in Boulder in January 1998.

Jenna Smythe, then 19, is serving 30 years in prison for conspiring with two adults to stab her mother and a 15-year-old runaway to death in Smythe's Arapahoe County apartment in 1994.

Jacob Ind, then 15, is serving two life sentences without parole for killing his mother and stepfather in their Woodland Park home in 1992.

Herman Douglas French Jr., then 14, choked, beat, shot and stabbed his mother to death in her Broomfield apartment in 1986. He remains on probation until 2007.

Larry Long Jr., then 18, stabbed his parents and a 17-year-old brother to death in their sleep in Longmont in 1986. He pleaded guilty to seconddegree murder and was sentenced to 48 years in prison, with no chance of parole before before 2010.

Ross Michael Carlson, then 19, shot and killed his parents execution-style on a dirt road in Douglas County in 1983. His lawyers claimed he suffered from multiple-personality disorder. It took six years before the courts declared him competent to stand trial. He died of leukemia before trial.

Michael Shane Wilkerson, then 14, beat and stabbed his mother in their Aurora home, then drowned her in the bathtub, in 1983. Relatives told investigators the woman ignored, belittled, neglected and humiliated her son. He pleaded guilty to second-degree murder and was sentenced to two to four years in a youth treatment facility in Denver.

William James Bresnahan Jr., then 16, stabbed and beat his parents to death during a summer camping trip in Summit County in 1964. He confessed and served more than 10 years in prison before then-Gov. Dick Lamm commuted his sentence in 1977. Former Gov. Roy Romer pardoned Bresnahan in 1987. Bresnahan became a doctor in California and last year tried, but failed, to win medical privileges in Denver.

He isn't sorry he plotted their executions and fired the fatal bullets. He isn't sorry that as a teenage murderer he's already spent a third of his life behind bars. He isn't sorry he likely will spend the rest of his days in a cage.

There are no apologies from Jacob, now 22.

"I don't second-guess what I did, not one bit," he says from behind a glass partition at the state penitentiary in Can~on City. "I'm happier now than I could imagine anyone ever being." Once every three or four days, an adolescent kills a parent or step-parent.

In the Denver area, there have been five such slayings just since 1998. The most recent happened two weeks before Christmas when a 14-year-old Longmont boy killed his adoptive mother and grandmother. The churchgoing teenager is due back in court in April.

The lessons from the stories of Jacob Ind and others who commit parricide can be murky, even for experts who study them.

"Why one person crosses the line and another one doesn't is nearly impossible to explain," says Michael Weissberg, a psychiatry professor at the University of Colorado School of Medicine.

Young parent-killers can be divided into three groups, says noted criminologist Kathleen Heide of the University of South Florida: the severely abused; the severely mentally ill; and the dangerously anti-social.

Jacob says he was putting a halt to a lifetime of sexual, physical and emotional abuse when at age 15 he killed his mother and stepfather in their Woodland Park home. He says the only sense of shame comes from the torment he claims was inflicted on him and his older brother.

His detractors call him a pathological liar and insist he fabricated, or at least exaggerated, any abuse. They describe him as a screwed-up high school freshman who wanted more freedom than his 41-year-old mother and 57-year-old stepfather would give.

Juror Kent Rankin never bought Jacob's battered-child defense strategy. He calls Jacob a petulant brat who lashed out because he didn't get his way at home. The death penalty would have been a more fitting punishment, he says.

"I could never find any signs of abuse," says John Falton, the former Teller County sheriff's detective who led the investigation. "And even if Jacob was abused, there's never any excuse for murder." The wounds Jacob inflicted endure.

His grandmother says the family remains irreparably divided. Jacob's brother has changed his name to avoid the notoriety that accompanied the family's tragedy. A Woodland Park woman, Mary Ellen Johnson, who helped his defense team and published a book about Jacob in 1997, saw her marriage fail partly because of her devotion to Jacob's cause.

And a holdout juror feels deep sorrow that she ultimately caved in and voted to convict.

"I feel like I was Jacob's only hope, and I let him down," juror Patricia Scott says.

As for Jacob, he says he isn't sorry for ending two lives.

But he lives with the knowledge that the killings didn't solve his problems.

"I thought that when they were gone, my whole world was going to be better," Jacob says. "I thought all the weight was going to be off my shoulders, all the misery would be gone. But it wasn't, and I said, "Man, I screwed up.'" Jacob was sleeping when `he awoke to gunshots, screams

It was about 1 a.m. on Dec. 17, 1992, when Gabrial Adams sneaked inside the unlocked front door of Jacob's house. An older schoolmate of Jacob's, Gabrial was armed with a .22-caliber handgun and a hunting knife.

Pamela and Kermode Jordan were upstairs, asleep in the master bedroom of their 4,000-square-foot home just outside Woodland Park. Jacob was sleeping, too. He awoke to "gunshots and screaming. My mom was calling me to her room." As Gabrial fired the .22 toward the sleeping couple and slashed at them in the dark with the knife, Jacob sat in his bed, waiting for the end of the attack he helped plan. But he and Gabrial had loaded the wrong type of bullets; they didn't strike with enough force to kill. The details in this account are from interviews with Jacob and other key participants, court records and newspaper reports.

"My mom was running around hysterical, screaming for me to get the intruder," Jacob says.

He climbed out of bed and went into his parents' room. He grabbed a can of bear Mace and sprayed Kermode first, then his mom. Jacob pulled Kermode's .357 Magnum out of the bathroom linen closet. He loaded a single bullet into the chamber.

"My mom kept screaming and screaming," Jacob says. "I didn't like that one bit, so I wanted to hurry and get it over with."

When his mother "first saw the gun, she thought I was going to shoot whoever was attacking them."

Kermode, suffering from four .22-caliber bullet and numerous stab wounds, was slumped on the floor when Jacob fired the .357 and killed him. "No! No!" Pam shouted. "Shoot the intruder! Not Kermode!"

Pam had been shot twice by the .22, stabbed in her stomach and head, and clobbered in the face. She was kneeling over her husband as her son loaded another bullet into the .357.

"I took a shot at her and it missed," Jacob says. Then he loaded a third bullet into the .357.

"When I pointed the gun at her again it finally set in what was going on. She said, "Why?' Right before I pulled the trigger, I said, "Because you was cruel to me.' And I shot her and she fell over."

"Her blood and brains went everywhere," he would tell investigators.

It took eight minutes from first gunshot to last. Jacob and Gabrial washed the blood off their hands and weapons, and Gabrial took the guns and knife home.

Jacob crawled into bed and tried to go back to sleep but couldn't. The blood, the yelling, it bothered him.

"I didn't have the peace I thought I would," he says. "All my problems were still there. I still felt all screwed up like I did before. It wasn't how I expected." He turned on some music, then got up to take a shower. He grabbed a blanket and his alarm clock and went downstairs to try sleeping on the couch.

"I figured the only way to make it right was to kill myself." He read the Bible and prayed. His cat, Hops, jumped on his chest and purred, and Jacob fell asleep.

Today, at 6-foot-3 and 180 pounds, Jacob is a muscular guy. He does most of his exercising in his cell. He's spent the past four years in isolation in the 756-bed, maximum-security state penitentiary.

Jacob was tried as an adult, and a jury convicted him of two counts of first-degree murder in 1994. He was too young for the death penalty, so El Paso District Judge Jane Looney sentenced him to two life terms without parole. He spends 22 hours and 45 minutes of every day locked in a 13-by-7-foot cell - and he says he enjoys it, even as he's trying to get out on appeal. He has no responsibilities and the freedom to think whatever he wants without facing the sort of denigration he grew up with, he says.

The courts rejected his appeal in 1996, but he's working on a long-shot motion seeking a new trial.

The arguments: prosecutorial misconduct; juror coercion by the judge concerning a statement about a hung jury; and ineffective assistance of counsel, mainly that his lawyers were ill-prepared and made serious mistakes.

For one thing, they never put him on the witness stand.

Jacob was born in San Jose, Calif., the second of two boys. His parents soon divorced, and his mother married Kermode Jordan a couple of years later.

Jacob dodges questions about sexual abuse, other than to say "it doesn't take a whole lot of imagination" to picture what a grown man can do to a little boy, and that his mother fondled him.

But in Mary Ellen Johnson's 1997 book, "The Murder of Jacob," Jacob describes having intercourse with his mother.

At the trial, Jacob's older brother, Charlie, testified that Kermode "would basically rape us. Tie us to the toilet. Have us get undressed. Then tie us so we couldn't move our hands or feet." Their mother would hit them with a belt, paddle, wooden spoon and cutting board, wash their mouths out with soap, and verbally cut them down, Charlie says. All for giving dirty looks, saying "no," watching the wrong TV shows or playing in the backyard without permission.

Jacob says the sexual stuff stopped after the family moved to Colorado in 1987.

They settled into the Sunnywood subdivision near Woodland Park, and Kermode became a hardware technician at Digital Equipment Corp. in Colorado Springs. Pam worked at Care & Share social-services center in the Springs.

Jacob says he was a "cool outcast" at Woodland Park High School. Others say he was a hippie.

He was a good student, a member of the debate team, and an offensive and defensive tackle on the freshman football team.

His mother was a witch, he says. "She was always berating me and putting me down and insulting me," Jacob says. "She lied to me and made me feel bad by saying I nearly killed her because I was born breach. I found out it wasn't true.

"I just wasn't what she wanted, and she let it be known." Pam and Kermode were drinkers, he says. At trial, Kermode was described as the town's well-known "mean drunk."

Sometimes Kermode would rage at the family, and they'd have to hide his guns and knives.

By the summer of 1992, tension was building at home, Jacob says. Financial problems forced his parents to put their $250,000 house up for sale, and Kermode was about to be laid off.

Kermode and Pam often teamed up to yell at and smack Jacob for arguing with them. "I was so scared of being hit all the time that if my mom even just raised her hand, I'd duck. She'd say, "Oh, it's all right, I'm not going to hit you.

"Then she'd laugh about it."

Charlie moved out of the house in August 1992, a few weeks before his senior year at Woodland Park High. Jacob was a freshman, and on Sept. 26, he turned 15.

Football season and a dishwashing job at Jan's Cafe kept Jacob busy, but with Charlie out of the house, all the attention was on Jacob.

Jacob retreated into his bedroom. He toyed with suicide. He says he was in a haze, all his emotions colliding.

Then a friend suggested killing Pam and Kermode, and they stole a .22 handgun from another friend's house.

In October, Jacob was feeling better. Maybe he wouldn't have to kill them after all.

But one Sunday he came down from his bedroom. Pam and Kermode were watching football on TV and ordered him back upstairs to finish his homework.

"I was a little mad, but I don't think I gave them a dirty look. They said I did. I turned to go back upstairs, and Kermode jumped out of his chair and he blindsided me, shoving me into this microwave cart. He was screaming and yelling and threatening me. He was shaking, he was so mad."

"Screw you," Jacob howled to himself. "It's never going to get any better."

Jacob became a ghost in the house, refusing even to eat dinner with them. He and his friend talked more about killing them. "The worse and worse things got, the more it changed from fantasy to, "I have to do this. I cannot survive without it.'"

The friend wanted to make it look like a Satanic killing, "cutting up the bodies and throwing blood all over."

"But he was off his rocker, and I really didn't like the idea of having this kid cut up my parents and do all this weird, sick stuff to them."

So Jacob turned to Gabrial Adams, an 18-year-old schoolmate. He offered Gabrial $2,000.

They considered poisoning Pam and Kermode, then settled on a burglary-gone-bad scheme. Jacob would sleep through a nighttime attack, get up in the morning, go to school and pretend like it had happened after he'd left.

"It was supposed to be two shots," Jacob says, "quick and painless." As planned, with his parents dead upstairs, he woke up and headed off to school. Suicide didn't appeal to him anymore. He had to tell someone, ultimately confiding in a friend. The friend told a counselor and the principal, who called the authorities.

The detectives and prosecutors who handled the case say they found no evidence of abuse. Jacob never testified, and jurors weren't swayed by what little they heard from his brother, says juror Rankin.

"Having to empty the dishwasher, having to clean the bathroom, having Mom take the phone away during dinner - I'm sorry, that's not abuse. That's chores," says former detective Falton, now an investigator with the district attorney's office for El Paso and Teller counties.

Bill Aspinwall and Gordon Denison, who prosecuted Jacob, say two points bolstered their case: the weeks-long planning of the killings, and the brutality of the crime.

"I keep blaming myself," she says from her home in Arizona. "I knew the unhappiness in their eyes. I wish I had done more to get the boys out of there."

Trenbeath doesn't blame Jacob for killing her daughter, though some days she hates him for it. Mostly, she blames Kermode.

"He was evil," she says. "He controlled Pam's mind completely." "In her own way, Pam was a good mother," Trenbeath adds. "She made some mistakes, but she didn't deserve to die like that." Mary Ellen Johnson isn't sure what to think anymore.

The mother of a Woodland Park High student at the time, she befriended Jacob while he was in jail. She spent hundreds of hours getting him to talk about the abuse.

In 1997, she self-published "The Murder of Jacob." It ends with Gabrial Adams' trial in late 1994, at which he was convicted and also sentenced to life without parole.

She had hoped her work would help Jacob. It didn't, she says, and she's not sure Jacob's version of events is the complete truth.

She's not surprised at his lack of remorse.

"I don't think he's come to terms with killing them," she says. "Kids like Jacob who commit heinous crimes, they go to a place where the soul is sucked out of their bodies. It's not that they have no emotion, it's that they have too much and have to shut it down." She remains angry at the legal system for not trying Jacob as a juvenile, which would have meant psychiatric help and the possibility of freedom at age 21.

"There are a lot of Jacobs out there,"

she says. "There must be a better way to deal with them." Ind is now conservative`and a fan of country music

Murder was the only option, Jacob says. "I had no way out." He says, contradicting prosecutors, that he and his brother had told friends, teachers, social workers and their father about the abuse, but no one helped.

"All my life I was told I was some dirty, rotten kid who got what I deserved, and I believed that."

Jacob doesn't know what he'd say to a teenager in a similar situation.

"You can't tell them that there's other solutions. It's not going to register."

What must happen, he says, is for friends, teachers and others to take notice of the troubled kids around them, and step in to help them. "Kids don't get miserable for no reason. Kids don't hate life for no reason." Today, Jacob says he loves life.

He earned a bachelor's degree in biblical studies in April and is a few months away from his master's. He has a 20-year-old fiance┌e, someone he knew from school, who visits every week and is helping to prepare the court papers that could lead to a new trial. He works out, watches TV, writes and reads letters, and gets four phone calls a month.

He's everything his parents would have hated: conservative, a fan of country-western music and religious. "If I had known I would turn out some right-wing Christian dude, I would have done a better job killing myself," he jokes.

Jacob knows that many people see him as a monster.

"My mom and Kermode forfeited all their human worth," he says. "I can't feel bad about it. It sounds terrible to say. But a lot of people who've been molested are going to understand it."

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